Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes: The Bestseller That Helped Invent the National Park

Here is the joke Wordsworth had to live with: for much of his lifetime, his best-selling book was not the poetry – it was a travel guide. A clergyman once asked the great man whether he had written anything else besides his Guide to the Lakes. Posterity, though, has taken its revenge on the joke, because the modest guidebook turned out to be one of the most consequential things Wordsworth ever wrote: a founding document of landscape conservation, containing the sentence in which the idea of a national park first stirs in England – the Lake District imagined as "a sort of national property", belonging in spirit to everyone with an eye to see it. Every protected view our guests photograph today stands, in part, on that sentence. Here is the story of the poet as travel writer – and prophet.

An anonymous beginning

The Guide began humbly in 1810 as an anonymous introduction to a clergyman's book of Lake District engravings – hack work, frankly, taken for money. But Wordsworth being Wordsworth, the hack work grew a soul: he kept revising and expanding the text under his own name until the definitive fifth edition of 1835, by which time it had become the book on the region – part practical guide, part landscape essay, part manifesto. The poet knew his subject as no writer ever has: born on the district's edge, schooled inside it, resident of its central valleys for decades, and a walker whose lifetime mileage among these fells beggars belief. The Guide distils all of it – how the valleys radiate like wheel-spokes, how the light works, why the cottages look grown rather than built – into prose that remains, two centuries on, startlingly good company on the road.

What the Guide actually says

Three of its themes still organise how the world sees this landscape. First, unity: Wordsworth taught readers to perceive the Lake District as one composed whole – a single masterpiece of interlocking valleys, best understood (he suggested, with a poet's cheek) from an imaginary viewpoint in the clouds between the highest fells, from which the valleys spread like spokes from a hub. Second, harmony: he celebrated the man-made Lakeland – whitewashed farms, drystone walls, native trees – as nature's collaborator, and scolded incomers whose showy villas and alien larch plantations jarred the picture; he was, in effect, writing planning guidance decades before planning existed, and the National Park's design sensibilities descend from his strictures. Third, and greatest: custodianship. In the Guide's famous conclusion he expressed the wish that the district be deemed a sort of national property, with a right and interest belonging to everyone possessing "an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy". It took more than a century of campaigning by his heirs – John Ruskin, Canon Rawnsley and the National Trust founders, the access movement – before the Lake District National Park was created in 1951, and UNESCO added World Heritage inscription in 2017; both documents, in spirit, are footnotes to Wordsworth's sentence. The Park tells its own story at lakedistrict.gov.uk.

The railway fight: the prophet turns protester

Wordsworth's custodianship had teeth, and in 1844 he bared them. A railway was projected from Kendal to the shore of Windermere, promising to pour excursion crowds into the district's heart, and the 74-year-old Laureate went to war: letters to the press, and a furious sonnet demanding, in its famous opening, whether no corner of English ground was safe from "rash assault". He was mocked then and since as a hypocrite – the man whose Guide had summoned the tourists now barring the door – and the fairest verdict admits both truths: his arguments mixed genuine conservation with real snobbery about the "imperfectly educated" masses. But he lost only half the battle – the line was stopped short of the lakeshore, terminating at what became Windermere town – and the deeper question he forced (how many visitors can a fragile landscape love before loving it to death?) has never left the region's agenda since. Every modern debate about traffic, parking and honeypot villages is Wordsworth v. the Railway, round two hundred.

Reading the landscape with the Guide in hand

For today's visitor, the Guide is a startlingly practical companion – his advice on where the beauty actually lives (valleys and lakeshores over summits; edges and thresholds over centres; autumn colour and changing weather over postcard blue skies) remains the connoisseur's route to the district, and several of his set-piece viewpoints are stops our guests recognise the moment we pull in. Modern editions are readily available, and the Wordsworth Trust's museum at Grasmere (wordsworth.org.uk) sets the book among the manuscripts and maps of its making. To drive the central Lakes with the Guide's eyes – reading walls, woods and farm placements as an inherited artwork – is to have the landscape effectively narrated by its greatest resident.

Getting hold of the Guide

Happily, the book never went out of print for long: modern paperback editions of the Guide to the Lakes are inexpensive and widely stocked – the Grasmere and Ambleside bookshops always carry it, and the Wordsworth Trust's own shop offers it alongside facing-page maps and commentary. It reads beautifully in short stretches over a holiday, and travellers who like their guidebooks opinionated will find the Laureate's asides on bad architecture and worse planting deliciously undiminished by two centuries.

Touring "the national property"

We named no small part of our working philosophy after his sentence without realising it: showing guests the Lake District as one composed, storied whole – every man's property who brings the eye and heart – is precisely the job description. Our small-group Wordsworth tours from Windermere and Ambleside, maximum seven guests, travel the landscape the Guide taught the world to prize, with the poet's arguments, quarrels and best viewpoints woven into the day; our wider lakes touring extends the lesson across the whole "wheel" of valleys. Wordsworth wrote the user's manual for this place. Two centuries on, we are happy to be among its readers-aloud.

This article is part of our Wordsworth guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.